Beats News

Valentino Mora returns to Spazio Disponibile with his first full-length 'Underwater'. A mesmerizing listening trip over the course of eight tracks taking you into his deep sea world of dark minimalism and eerie drone rhythm structures.

Downwards’ rum gang of industrial misfits mutate My Disco’s ‘Environment’ album in slow, brutal and hypnotic styles ranging from Karl O’Connor’s smudged gamelan rework as Cub, to a 16 minute stunner by Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (Prurient & Low Jack)
‘Environment Remixes’ serves to tie up a 10 year loop since Karl O’Connor (Regis) first became rapt with My Disco’s 2010 single ‘Young/You’, which lead to him remixing the Aussie band’s song ‘My Decade’ in 2016, and eventually issue the reverberating clang of their ‘Environment’ LP on his Downwards label in 2019. For the remix suite, they’ve picked a gang of manacled producers to reanimate the album’s cranky mania and classic industrial spirit with suitably bruising results.
The swingeing, stygian flow of Karl O’Connor’s Cub remix of Equatorial Rainforest’ returns a big highlight,
possibly the project’s very slowest and loaded square between the eyes of early ‘90s Coil and 23 Skidoo, while Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s 16 minute take on LP centrepiece ‘Act’ follows that humid line to a frighteningly strong scene of cicadas and crackling neon sleaze sloshed with martial kettle-drum rolls recalling Con Schnitzler’s ‘Conditions of The Gas Giant’, before slipping into the lushest ambient techno mode.
Following the rush of his recent records, Sam Kerridge renders the doomy beckon of ‘Rival Colour’ more tentatively, stalked with spare drums and lugubrious bass, and Bristol’s Giant Swan follow a hunch for lurching halfstep on their reduction of ‘An Intimate Conflict’, for Oliver Ho to amp the phosphorus guitar burn of ‘1987’ as Slow White Fall with the sort of noisy conviction that also makes his new album such a zinger.

A new sub-label of the longstanding Canadian electro imprint Suction Records, Ice Machine — focusing on old-school wave/post-punk sounds — is thrilled to present a new, deluxe reissue of “Pow Wow”, the debut 1982 solo LP from Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder. Now expanded to a double-LP, and also released on CD/digital, it’s a definitive reissue which now includes Mallinder’s early solo discography in its entirety. This collection of mutant dub/funk/postpunk sounds just as fresh and contemporary in 2020 as it did in 1982 (note Autechre’s inclusion of standout cut “Del Sol” in a mix earlier this year), and highlights Mallinder’s crucial contributions to Cabaret Voltaire.

Some words from Mr.Mallinder on the scene and era from which “Pow Wow” was born: “It was an interesting, and inspiring, time. The primal caterwaul of punk was dying and lots of really significant things were emerging from the fires. Much looser vibes were in the air and there was a much more exploratory feel. Punk had championed a visceral, anti-intellectual approach but in truth the real characters brought so much more to the table, and what began to happen - from people like The Pop Group to Throbbing Gristle, and emerging scenes from No New York to Factory Records - is we began to embrace the art of it all. There was acknowledgement of the importance of books, films, graphic art, and experimentation with all those mediums. We were just as interested in turning over rocks to see what lay beneath, as throwing them. There was a sense of new magik emerging.”

“Pow Wow” was commissioned by the Fetish Records label, and recorded at the Cabs’ Western Works studio, where Mallinder would spend his days recording with Cabaret Voltaire, and continue on alone into night recording his debut solo material. “I slept very little in those days,” he adds, continuing: “It was done on 8 track and very multi-tracked, so lots of recording, then bouncing, and overdubbing, to get the integrated feel of the tracks. I became very adept at pressing record then jumping onto equipment to play it - it was actually a very 'live' record in that sense. I've always seen rhythm at the core of what I do so I loved the layering of counter rhythms. The sequence/arpeggiator parts were all drum machine triggers that were played live. It was about creating a distinct groove so arrangements came from weaving in and out of those linear grooves. It was fun to play everything from drums, guitars, keys, trumpet, percussion, tapes… and record and produce it all. Prince got it from me!”

Surprisingly, Mallinder’s first solo LP would also prove to be his last - that is, until last year’s critically-acclaimed solo return “Um Dada”, on Dais.

This new edition of “Pow Wow” contains 14 songs, and is housed in a recreation of the original, iconic Neville Brody jacket, painstakingly recreated using scans of Brody’s original artwork elements. The 2LP vinyl edition is in a reverse board, thick-spine jacket, and adds a 12”x24” folded poster/insert, featuring unused elements from Brody’s original designs, sketches, and instructions for the LP. The CD edition comes in a reverse board, 6-panel digipack.


2-11 from the Pow-Wow LP on Fetish Records, 1982.

13-14 from the Temperature Drop / Cool Down 12” on Fetish Records, 1981.

12 from the Fetish Records compilation The Last Testament, 1983.

1 edit from the Pow-Wow Plus LP on Fetish Records (Japanese pressing), 1984.

Transcendentally Beautiful, The Space Lady's Music Is Returning To Earth. Transmitting Messages Of Peace And Harmony, The Space Lady Began Her Odyssey On The Streets Of Boston In The Late 70s, Then San Francisco Ten Years Later, Playing Versions Of Contemporary Pop Music With An Accordion And Dressed Flamboyantly. Following The Theft And Destruction Of Her Accordion , The Space Lady Invested In A Then-new Casio Keyboard, Complete With A Phase Shifter And Headset Mic, Birthing An Otherworldly New Dimension To Popular Song That Has Captured The Imaginations Of The Underground And Its Leading Exponents Ever Since Having Toured Successfully All Around The World With Her Greatest 90s Hits Record, She Felt It Was Time To Record New Songs... And So She Did!

For his first EP ever, Master Flashhh carved 5 beautiful tracks of analogue funkiness, drawing inspiration from drifting in Georgia, solitary walks alongside the ocean in Finist?re Brittany or recording his neighbors banging behind the wall.

A native of Poznan, the multi-instrumentalist composer/producer Waclaw Zimpel has steadily been gaining recognition as one of the most singular and original talents to have emerged from Poland in contemporary times. His second solo album 'Massive Oscillations' is set for release on January 31st, and is his first for the Amsterdam-based label Ongehoord. At various points Waclaw deploys bass clarinet, alto clarinet, electronics, prepared upright piano and Yuri Landman guitar object. Wojciech Traczyk adds double bass and Holly Hock provides vocals to 'Release', whist all tracks were mixed by James Holden, who according to Zimpel "added his magic touch". 'Massive Oscillations' is Zimpel's most accomplished album to date - a hypnotic and beguiling work given to moments of subtle euphoria. Gently rhythmic, repetetive but morphing grooves are decorated with elegant musical flourishes. An exquisite vertical listening experience, tracks rev like ignition on a motor. They swell, undulate and breathe in a non linear motion, hovering more than moving, or steadily levitating heavenwards. 'Massive Oscillations' is the result of a nine-day residency at the Willem Twee studio in Den Bosch, Netherlands. The longplayer is not only a consolidation of Zimpel's previous experiments, but is also driven by his curiosity and desire to explore new avenues and possibilities, striving to create an innovative musical vernacular. Inspired as much by jazz as electronics, minimalism and roots music from across the world, he doesn't so much blur boundaries as eradicate them altogether. "I was looking for new kinds of sounds and had an idea of where I wanted 'Massive Oscillations' to go," says Zimpel, "but that all changed the moment I started playing with the studio's collection of vintage synthesizers and electronic equipment." In keeping with his restless improvisational spirit, Zimpel jettisoned previous ideas and set about using the studio's array of oscillators, generators, sequencers, tape recorders and filters (alongside his beloved clarinet) to capitalize on opportunities the facility offered him. Subliminal factors were also at play: Having tuned the oscillators by ear for 'Sine Tapes' and title track 'Massive Oscillations', whilst attempting to work out melodies on his clarinet, Zimpel found he'd inadvertently arrived at a lower frequency than intended. By a happy accident, he realized he'd subconsciously been tuning in to the bells of St Jan's Cathedral, which is located close to the studio. "It was this kind of magical coincidence that really helped shape the recording", he recalls.

"Mystical, wide-eyed hyper-exotica flavours from Mother Gaia herself. Two mind-bending chants of dub-filtered tribalism sprawl out of the 7” plate; the Yin side, PIPE, bounces left to right with a hazy sway and morphing, lick-up vocals. Evolving across the Yang lies LABYRINTH, a psychoactive concoction of distant, ambient landscapes and mechanical, wood-polished drumming paying homage to the sun dial.
33 0r 45? Let your unconscious state decide”.
Hand stamped artwork.

3x12"

A master in letting shapes find their form, Dixon allows the listener to wallow in recurring scenes. Lost Communication Procedure, Found In Space and Remarkable Wanderer etch a sound world of choral vibrations and cinematic dirge. Where gaseous clouds scrape the natural sonic pastures of such environments, the hypnotized listener staggers a drunken step, moving sideways by 0 or 1 or -1 into new scenes. Not least an expert in industrial abstraction, a human silhouette permeates Dixon’s sound. His ethereal storytelling portrays the heart-rending romance of Unconditional Love and unearths in I’m Away In Detroit monologuing moodscapes recalling our GPS voice assistants.
Out of Darkness initial recalls Kraftwerk’s Geiger counter, as from pure signal data and feedback spells an unceasing locomotive wormhole. Hazy, dense grooves drive across bleak city scenes in We Can Rebuild Him, into the raw vibe of Framework and the rude stabs of Spectrum of Light. The varying presence of Dixon's work is one of his textural signatures, at arm's length, brushing right within, and far out. The bumping mood of Earth Station is one such moment, close enough to isolate the diving bass somewhere within, simultaneously from afar it becomes positively gravitational.
The first two records of the series are rightfully considered among the finest embodiments of contemporary minimalism, symbolic documents of afro-futurism. This new work revives the classic series, continuing the relationship between Tresor and the undisputed master of Detroit techno into the present day.

'Flørist adds an important chapter to Baroque Sunburst's quest for the hypnotic and hybrid side of dance music. Moving effortlessly between different BPMs and orchestrating with an innate elegance, the Berlin-based Canadian producer has assembled three long mesmerizing journeys.

He straddles Terry Riley-esque minimalism, Warp's A.I. sci-fi side and the emotional depth of Basic Channel, blending these whilst maintaining dancefloor efficacy. "Intermedia 1" is architectural music where every detail is essential and everything is constantly developing.'

Picture Disc

Newcastle born, Melbourne-based producer Cooper Bowman steps out as Roman Nails with his first 12' for Beat Concern. Following tapes on Where To Now (UK), Night People (US) + Rhythm Works (AU), Roman Nails has maintained a steady flow of experimental techno over the last few years. Utilising a minimal, CV-triggered hardware set-up and from a perspective rooted in improvisation, RN is a unique beast. The tongue-in-cheek titled, All Hardware No Tools, is his most concise and well-considered release to date, offering noirish synth tones, slinking basslines and captivating interplay between a 707 and 727. 300 copies.

Der Multi-Instrumentalist und Produzent hat sich mit fein strukturierten und enthusiastischen Kompositionen bereits einen Namen gemacht. Sein 2016 erschienenes Album „Forms“ zog mit seiner spielerischen Verwebung von Rhythmen und Samples die Aufmerk-samkeit der elektronischen Musikszene auf sich. In diesem Jahr veröffentlicht The Micronaut nun Olympia (Summer Games) – ein Album, das seinen sorgfältigen Produktionsstil weiterführt und dem Geist der Olympischen Sommerspiele gewidmet ist. Denn auch wenn diese abgesagt wurden, so sind die damit verbundenen Tugenden wie Durchhaltevermögen und Zusammenhalt zeitlos und gerade in diesen Wochen um so wichtiger. Solch grundlegende Prinzipien, die den Geist der Olympischen Spiele ausmachen, sind es auch, die The Micronaut umgetrieben haben. Und so war es kein Zufall, dass Summer Games entstanden ist: „Ich habe bisher immer Konzept-Alben veröffentlicht. Dieses Mal habe ich Olympia gewählt, weil es nicht nur Wettkampf, sondern auch eine Friedensbewegung ist, bei der es um die Menschen geht, ganz egal welcher Nation sie angehören.“ Diesen vielfältigen und stets vitalen, lebhaften Geist spiegelt das Album wider: Das verspielt-zarte Uneven Bars oder das träumerisch-sphärische Table Tennis, sie alle erzählen von den besonderen Momenten, von Siegen und Niederlagen und all den Facetten, die dem Sport innewohnen. Dadurch ist eine Reise entstanden, eine schwungvolle, aber auch turbulente Achterbahnfahrt, die den künstlerischen Anspruch The Micronauts abbildet: „Lebhaft, expressiv, dramatisch, manchmal ruhig, manchmal kraftvoll – ich versuche immer die Vibes von Wanderlust, Hoffnung und individuellen Momenten in meiner Musik einzufangen“ – erzählt der in Leipzig lebende Künstler. Und dieses Mal liegt das Spannungsfeld zwischen sportlichen Disziplinen – in dem sich The Micronaut musikalisch ausdrückt. Wobei seine Musik keinesfalls zum Sich-Messen anregt, vielmehr sind viele Tracks mit ihrem übermütigen, optimistischen Vibe für die Tanzflächen der Clubs geeignet, um sich die Anspannung der zuweilen olympischen Herausforderungen des Alltags von der Seele zu tanzen. Dazu hat The Micronaut anspruchsvolle Arrangements mit fließenden Melodien und unaufgeregtem Gesang kombiniert und den Weg für ein neues, collagenartiges musikalisches Genre geebnet. Bisweilen dreht Summer Games sogar in Richtung Elektro-Pop ab, dann wieder ist es inspiriert von old-schooligem Hip Hop and in anderen Momenten mündet und explodiert es förmlich in intelligent gesetzten musikalischen Hochsprüngen. Die Messlatte liegt hoch – doch bei allem Auf und Ab scheint immer durch, dass The Micronaut ein begeisterter Musikliebhaber ist, der Ideen und Inspirationen von überall her sammelt und sie unter Einsatz seines ganz eigenen emotionalen Prismas übersetzt.

Another year on the HITD calendar, another stunning new solo release with Brian Case.

This third album somehow manages to compile and condense the best bits of its predecessors, and the magnificent viridian, glacial universe developed by Case since the beginning of his solo ventures is brought to the forefront.

The Chicago artist centres his elusive, dehumanised compositions around two simple, minimal elements. Using just vocals and synths, he has created a simultaneously modern and post-apocalyptic soundtrack, where music exists as the final traces of the footsteps of humanity.

LTD Edition!

Can wurde 1968 von Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay, Michael Karoli und Jaki Liebezeit gegründet. Die Gruppe nutzte und überschritt gleichermaßen alle Grenzen der ethnischen, elektronischen, experimentellen und modernen klassischen Musik.
Ege Bamyasi lässt den Dunst fallen und schlägt von Anfang an mit einem scharfen Schlag zu. Das oft als das "intensivste" Can-Werk bezeichnete Album Ege Bamyasi, wurde zum Teil durch den Erfolg der Single "Spoon" unterstützt, der Proto-Synth-Pop (oder Synth-
Rock) Song war die Titelmusik der beliebten deutschen Fernsehserie Das Messer und erreichte Anfang 1972 die Deutschen Top 10. Das bekannte Album enthält auch den Track "Vitamin C", laut Pitchfork ist es "...immer noch der beste Funk, der je aus
Europa kam." Kürzlich erschien das Stück auch in den beliebten Serien The Preacher und The Get Down. Can's starker Einfluss hat nie nachgelassen, und ihre Handschrift zeigt sich in den Bands, die ihre Bedeutung anerkennen - von Portishead, James Murphy, New Order, Factory Floor, Public Image Ltd, Mogwai, Kanye West und Radiohead - sowie in anderen Disziplinen wie bildende Kunst und Literatur.

- "Can ist die revolutionärste Band aller Zeiten" Stephen Morris (New Order)

Erhältlich in limitierter Auflage im grünen Vinyl inklusive MP3 Downloadkarte

We Are Pleased And Proud To Be Releasing A New Album By Mayerling, roche'. Following "cut Up", His Debut Album Full Of Fruitful Collaborations, Sylvain Bombled -founding Member Of Mayerling- Is Back From A Long Introspection And Gives Birth To A New Album, Still Under The Influence Of German Founding Fathers Harmonia Or Cluster, And Refined Electronic Music Such As Aparat Or Boards Of Canada.


More Electronic And Adventurous Than Its Predecessor, "roche" Sets Synthesizers And Analog Sequencers At The Heart Of The Album. Vocals Have Almost Completely Disappeared, In Order To Captivate The Listener With The Graphic Powers And Cinematographic Qualities Of The New Tracks That Come To Light Throughout The Listenings, Just Like Ambient Hymns.

The Production And Richness Of Details Take The Listener To Lonely Arid Lands, Striking As The Sunstroke Of Midday Sun In The Valley Of Death.

Another two poignant songs about life as it is, with ups and downs.... catchy minimal synth melodies with very personal dark lyrics. Both tracks were written and produced by Lidia Fiala and Per-Anders Kurenbach back in 2015.

The METATRON is now out! A live album which publish as the ninth reference Faith Disciplines, a label dedicated to industrial, experimental electronics and noisy shit, which has already released notable references, such as German Army/GeAr or Group. METATRÓN has markedly tekno bases, some of them more teknopunk, kind of Suicide with a rockabilly Alan Vega, or others more minimal similar to Bruce Gilbert’s Dome. But for me the coolest part of the project is the set: piezoelectric microphones makes sound to a 1.8-sheet stainless steel as a bass drum, a stainless steel board with a group of thin galvanized plates, reverb springs, industrial trays and many rivets that serve as “melody” in addition it uses a few accessories such as cages, a drill, steel strips, threaded rods with washers with the same metric, spoons and others. All this sound mass is processed by cheap pedals and pedalboards (digital microprocessors) for guitar, such as the ZOOM GFX-707, or the ZOOM G3XN, with this one, several LOOPS are built in an artisanal way (manual mode) composing the horny danceable bases. No musical instruments, no computers, synthesizers, sequencers or shits (listen, all that is very expensive) is necessary to start to make some beats to dance.

Fischgeist was recorded in a former water tank in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg in August 2019. The nineteenth-century brick building consists of five layered circles, with a spiral staircase in the middle leading up to an exit to a hilltop. Inside, it’s humid and cold, the temperature always around 8–10 C°. The building’s acoustics produce a long reverberation that lasts up to 20 seconds.

‘One day between recording sessions, a man, a passerby, wanted to look inside the building. He told me that it used to be full of fish. For a second I imagined a huge round aquarium with loads of fish swimming around in circles. Then I realized that he meant dead fish were kept there, to be sold on markets during the GDR era. But the image of fish swimming in the space stayed with me.’

In conversation with the space of the water tank, Tomoko Sauvage searches beyond the limits of her self-invented ‘natural synthesizers’: porcelain and glass bowls, filled with water and amplified with hydrophones.

While she continues to develop some of the classic techniques heard on her previous album Musique Hydromantique (Shelter Press, 2017) – hydrophonic feedback (Kinetosis Study) and ‘fortune biscuits’ (porous pieces of terracotta that emit tiny singing bubbles) (Deluge) – here new elements are combined with delicate gestures to make curious noises: stroking bowls’ surfaces to imitate the voices of sea mammals (Metamorphosis), drawing dots and circles by rubbing stones against stones underwater (Exit) … The underwater amplification of quasi-inaudible sound is even more magnified in the air by the echo of the water tank. Not only tiny bubbles, but also micro-movements of the bones and veins of the hand holding the sonorous objects in the water, are intensely amplified – sounding like a tempest on the opening Deluge. Sauvage’s longtime research into hydrophonic feedback develops with her new obsession with natural harmonics and sympathetic resonance. In Flying Vessels, the percussive notes of struck bowls resonate and turn into feedback loops before decaying, fueled by electric signal gain. Kinetosis Study is a sonic etude on fluid dynamics – the flow velocity, pressure and density of manually shaped water waves directly controlling the aquatic synthesizer’s parameters.

August, when the mid-summer Ghost Festival is held, is traditionally known as the Ghost Month throughout East Asia. The spirits of the dead visit their living families, who welcome them with feasts, dancing and music. Miniature lantern-laden boats are released in rivers, to help lost ghosts find their way home.

Animated by formless matter – water, electricity, sound – Fischgeist celebrates a phantasmagoric journey, as the souls of aquatic lifeforms find their way out of the labyrinth of the water tank.

Credits
Composed, performed and mixed by Tomoko Sauvage
Recorded and produced by bohemian drips prior to ‘Speicher’ festival in Berlin, August 2019 (binaural recording with a KU-100 dummy head microphone)
Mastered by Andreas Kauffelt in Berlin
Cover drawings by Baien Mōri (1798-1851)
© Tomoko Sauvage and bohemian drips – all rights reserved

Waking the Dreaming Body is the follow-up to Tucson artist Karima Walker's 2017 standout album Hands In Our Names, which garnered praise from Pitchfork, MOJO, and Bandcamp. The album includes dense harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and Karima's dulcet singing voice. The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient work and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting, their ebb and flow recalling liminal states of half-sleep where images and emotions are recalled and forecasted from the previous night's dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking and dreaming.

Harry Bertoia's Glowing Sounds LP contains three versions of the same composition, each transferred at different tape speeds in accordance with the artist's instructions. This is the third LP to be released from Bertoia's extensive tape archive and it's the first, of many, to be released using instructions left behind by the artist himself.

Bertoia wrote the concept for this Glowing Sounds LP on a note in 1975 and slipped it into the master tape case where it sat unread for 45 years. The idea was simple, transfer the original recording at its original speed and two slower speeds. Bertoia noticed that the results, however, were profound.

Recorded on January 20, 1975 using two large gongs, Glowing Sounds is one of the most powerfully minimal recordings yet discovered in Bertoia's collection. The artist's note left with the tape indicated that it was recorded at a speed of 15 IPS (inches per second) but slowing it down to speeds of 7.5 IPS and 3.25 IPS were quite effective for enhanced playback. Side A features the original 15 IPS recording and the 50% slower 7.5 IPS recording. Side B features a 20 minute, ultra-slow version at 3.25 IPS.

Long, deep drones and powerful overtones define the sound of this recording. Comparison of the three speeds provides a revealing magnification of Bertoia's gongs, overtones and the artist's inventive approach to performance, composition and recording.

Bio:
Harry Bertoia first gained some artistic visibility in the early 1940s, then came into prominence with his sculptural, ergonomic chairs, produced by Knoll Furniture beginning in 1952, which quickly became classics of modernist furniture. Inspired by the resonant sounds emanating from metals as he worked them and encouraged by his brother Oreste, whose passion was music, Harry restored a fieldstone "Pennsylvania Dutch" barn as the home for this experiment in sounding sculptures which he had begun in the late 1950s. Bertoia was an obsessive composer and relentless experimenter, often working late into the night and accumulating hundreds of tapes of his best performances; Oreste, too, would explore and record the sculptures' sounds during his annual visits to his brother's home in rural Pennsylvania.

Harry Bertoia's recently dismantled Sonambient barn collection was an attentive listener's paradise full of warm, expressive instruments that were gorgeous visually and audibly. Nothing could prepare you, even on return visits, for the overwhelming experience of entering the spacious wood and plaster interior where gongs, some of them giant, hung among the ranks of standing sculptures of various metals. Over nearly twenty years of adding, culling and rearranging, Bertoia carefully selected nearly 100 harmonious pieces ranging in height from under a foot to more than fifteen feet. He considered this barn a full experience, sights and sounds comprising not a collection of works, but one piece unto itself. It was here, deep in the woods, that his Sonambient recording work took place.

Learning by experimentation was common for Bertoia and he mastered the art of tape recording, turning the Sonambient barn into a sound studio with four overhead microphones hanging from the rafters in a square formation. He would experiment with overdubbing by performing along to previous recordings, sometimes backwards, constantly improving his methods while also honing his performance skills. Bertoia was a careful editor of his own work and only chosen recordings remained, each with a date and carefully considered observations written on a note included with each tape. Through these pieces of paper a the artist's logic can be uncovered, a careful approach to composition, ideas, feelings and forms. The story of Sonambient barn collection will slowly be told through the release of recordings from the archive as well as installations and performances built from Bertoia's own recordings, lectures and a book.

Tim Gick's already-warped patchwork editing of the entire Crazy Doberman output thus far turns increasingly glitched out across the splattered quiltwork of a nine track LP on Aguirre. Any coherent sense of time departs early on the A-side; kicked off with the familiar sound of the Dobes' synth throb and Love-cry woodwinds on top of completely fried electric guitar squiggling, all suspended in spiritual foam; then battered to bits on the greasy flat top of the record's b-side.

Ringing modular synth sirens evoke alarmingly huge Southern watersnakes swimming on top of Oconee river. Total trip zone across two sides: brownouts in the sequence of events, dubby fadeouts, and bright jump cuts in space. Teases of cartoon barrlehouse tickling on the keys of a farmhouse piano and tape melt psychedelia. The recording session in Athens, Georgia was a total "CHUGFEST" recalls Frank Hurricane, the Appalachian juggalo folkie king, who joined the session with the Lafayette, Indiana crew. The presence of Hurricane's own "Life is Spiritual" mirth bulworks the record with a muddy, barefoot hippy hopefullness, steadying the log flume through the notcturnal psychic murk toward the holy morning dew. (J. Russ)

Clear Black Splattered Viny

Iraqi-born, canadian sound artist Rita Mikhael aka E-Saggila turns out turbulent rhythms and synth leads in her debut attack for Hospital Productions, following on from releases for Northern Electronics, Bank Records, Opal Tapes and Aught Void. If yr into Hiro Kone and Drew McDowell, this one comes highly recommended.

‘Corporate Cross’ pulls out nine tracks of reticulated percussion, wavey synth melodies, breakcore and ambient washes that map an ancient, byzantine feel onto densely urban sort of post-techno/IDM structures. It’s all less rave-wise than E-Saggila’s releases for Opal Tapes and her own label, Summer Isle, exploring a more narrative based, sound-designer dramaturgy of ideas that takes in the polychromatic burst of ‘Redcloud’, hymnal trance riffs in ‘Replica’, and rolling dubstep on ‘Mouth In Reach’, thru to Synkro-esque half step scenes in ‘For The Butterfly’, and ‘90s cyber-hacker styles in ’Slowland’, with a soaring denouement in ‘Mantis Print’.

As she explains: “this album is a framework of placement and displacement of what I recognize as organic and instinctive. The constructed sounds draw a parallel between primalism and mechanization, where structure and disorder mimic themselves through these titles. a lot of these ideas are based off of the environment I come in contact with and the familiar expression and tone that is set into this album. It's a narration of transparent rhythms and patterns I see as natural, but to the listener is observed as ambiguous. corporate cross scans through the themes of novelty in human and animal, endemic and deterioration, and the sub-systems of our concealed environment.”

Waking the Dreaming Body is the follow-up to Tucson artist Karima Walker's 2017 standout album Hands In Our Names, which garnered praise from Pitchfork, MOJO, and Bandcamp. The album includes dense harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and Karima's dulcet singing voice. The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient work and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting, their ebb and flow recalling liminal states of half-sleep where images and emotions are recalled and forecasted from the previous night's dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking and dreaming.

Príncipe’s dreamiest act supply a special batch of fizzing electronic exotica and ambient vignettes echoing the Black Atlantic waves of Drexciya, Iasos’ blessed new age harmonies, and the windswept wist of Zoviet France On their prodigal turn to Lisbon’s finest label following 2018 album ‘Apologia’, the trio of Alberto Arruda, António Arruda, and Sara Eckerson aka Niagara distill their wide-ranging influences in sloshing rhythms and briny electronic textures with a sense of mystery that is patently their own.
Their music on ‘Filho & Pais’ feels more enigmatic than ever, largely leaving regular percussion aside and letting their spontaneous hardware jams froth and lilt with an enchantingly loose, rhythmelodic sensibility and natural ecologic.
Like the Atlantic Ocean they live by, Niagara’s music feels eternally in churning flux, shaped by the elements and lunar cycles, rather than human hands. The relative absence of urgent drums leaves each piece more fluid and expansive, as epitomised on the gorgeous lather of glinting synth voices in EP highlight ’46 x 92m’, and what sounds like them riffing on a Drexciya intro in the retrofuturist enigma of ’Tília’, while the salty spray of ’21:44’ sounds like an early AFX ‘SAW’ number found in a Cornish rockpool. However, their rhythmic intuitions lead them to some of the most beautifully elusive patterns resembling sea creatures scuttling around coral under gulf-stream
heated waters on the three ‘Ano-‘ parts, helping shares up the release as a wonderfully imaginative package holiday to warmer climes for those who need it.

Timelash is the evolution of Embassador Dulgoon’s cryptozoological sci-fi opus ‘Hydrorion Remnants’ converging with Corum’s surreal sonic mapping as ‘Beguiling Isles’. The combined cinematic vision jettisons listeners through a psychedelic wormhole far beyond the usual perception of known audio latitude.

Aguirre Records has gone all out to inject this tribal dino DNA double slab of wax presented as twelve expansive and mesmerizing tracks of historical mutations linking early communication developments with speculative astrobiological impressions heard as mysterious & riveting melodies that wash over dizzying percussive styles and suspenseful ambience.

A variety of unexampled sounds take shape throughout as tectonic tablature, reptilian choral movements, bubbling bioluminescence, tube calls, orogenic bells, crustacean chatter, lost continent scales, high plains drifting riffs, and primordial soup lapping splashes revealing to listeners a living mural that is ’A Morphology of Wonders'.

The conjuring of cratonic creature harmonics resonate wildly from this interdimensional duet, emerging as Neopangaea music of now

The fifth record on New York Trax IMPORTS was produced by Le Talium who is a legend to any connoisseur of the obscure fringes of hard French electronics. “Inalterable” EP, as profound as it is abrasive, is a journey from otherworldly glitchy soundscapes all the way to a relentless hardcore maelstrom.

This double LP brings to light the music of Robert ÆOLUS Myers, featuring recordings from 1982 to 2006 that were previously available only on cassette or CD.
The music within A Retrospective tells the story of a man whose music elevates its listeners to a place of inspiration and enlightenment. Often ethereal, ÆOLUS' music is driven by synthesizers, melodic flutes, sweeping patterns, and subtle rhythms to seed inspiration from deep within the listener.

One might assume that ÆOLUS carved a new path for electronic music in Hawai'i, but the islands never quite fully embraced the burgeoning New Age scene that ÆOLUS found himself a part of during the 1980s and the early 1990s.

Few artists in Hawaii have produced a body of work, let alone embarked on a musical journey, such as the one that ÆOLUS has created.

For Aloha Got Soul, this release marks a new chapter of bringing rare and relatively unknown music of Hawai'i to the surface.

Trancemission over; Transmission begins. Delta Rain Dance is an experimental artist and label project delving into contemplative, and melancholic states, with a record that blissfully glides between ambient, and delicate-percussive, electronic states. A hybrid puzzle of melodic cuts, DJ tools and drum tracks, that can be mixed together to create new amalgamations of the source material.

'Trancemission/Transmission' showcases a musical narrative that transcends genres and moods, switching between flashes of dubbed techno, abstract percussive electronica, and stark downtempo vibes.

'Trancemission/Transmission' is a record structured around progressions, heavy on sound design and imagination. It takes the listener into different astral planes, from tranquil moments of temperate melodies, to off-kilter periods of electro. Ghostly radio transmissions, dubbed out Rhodes, underwater frequencies, and broadcasts from beyond the digital ether. It is a modern take on 'Music for Airports', albeit written for a post-millennial audience, one that grew up on Dilla, Vatican Shadow, Grouper and Digital Mystikz. Drum tracks, locked grooves, and sparse sketches of melody and reverb soaked harmonies. Delta Rain Dance has produced a body of work that exists in two halves; the trancemissions operating as celestial, ambient skits; moments of dreamlike serenity, while on the flip, carefully programmed beats infer moments of Detroit, dubstep, and IDM, gently providing the framework to the album's intricate, grainy basslines, and saturated overtones. The two halves of the record can be mixed together, and like a puzzle that needs to be solved, tracks fit together perfectly, creating an interactive musical game, in which the DJ can create new sonic interpretations of the album.

The 5th entry on the DDQ series continues to rake the kerbside muck of 'club music', presenting 2 disparate visions from 2 label heads.

KUMP's mastermind Gil.barte opens proceedings with the stuttering bodysludge of Guédé and Egareur. Two kleine nightmusiks to drag you out of meatspace, with the Kyuss-ala-PCP throb of Guédé especially sure to find favour on fog-bothering 8 AM+ floors worldwide.

Tempos pick up and lights turn down on the B-side, with Lostsoundbytes (Vastechoses label head), driving disintegrating delays and snares into 3 Belgiqué-nouveau tools, keeping the rhythm & textures bumping throughout.

Artwork by Thibaut de Wolf

Manchester club lynchpin Henzo smashes the debut platter on DJ Python’s Worldwide Unlimited with a bevy of dembow and garage-bred bangers that speak directly to the city’s transnational
dancehall links As the story goes, Henzo heard DJ Python plays his beats at the club he was managing in MCR’s hipster warzone - the NQ - and the pair soon hit it off, leading to Henzo now giving Python’s brand new label, Worldwide Unlimited, a killer starting point with ‘Not Like That, Not Like You’; four variations on a hyper-tropic sound that Henzo has been pushing for the last half decade and more with his Strange Riddims raves, whose upfront policy of dancehall modernism - from grime to reggaeton, hard drum and anything-goes Manc pressure - supremely informs his debut EP, proper.
Version for version Henzo confidently fires himself into the forward tier of Manchester producers, striking a heavy vein of mutant dembow-meets-Mahraganat pressure in the acidic bashment of the title tune, before stepping up the ghosted dub dynamic on a driving ‘Less Of That Mix’.
The other slow banger ‘For Your Consideration’ revolves a vocal snippet saying “speak to me” - one of Python’s often-used phrases - so was naturally elected to the EP, rolling out a bubbling,
sticky dembow-electro groove in the ‘Sauna Mix’, and a ruder UK-styled 2-stepper pivoting off woodblock snares in a screwfaced ‘Gym Mix’ Worldwide Unlimited is envisioned not only as a label, but a small gesture towards community uplift. 100% of label-side proceeds will be split between the artist and a local charity. Proceeds from WWUNLTD022 will go towards The Rec. Centre in Manchester,
org) a casual space in which artists, DJs, interviewers and teachers can create, record & hang out. Members of the BAME & LGBTQIA+ communities, as well as people on universal credit and/or benefits, are offered free usage of the space.

Ulla & Perila fluff up ambient pillows for your anxieties under their Log alias on a gorgeous debut outing with Experiences Ltd, following from standout additions to the Documenting Sound tape series - think Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas soundtracking the Log Lady’s more rested dreams ‘Log’ sees the pair building on a blossoming relationship formed over 2020 lockdown, which resulted in a pair of low-key trips for Portugal’s silence box, and now this fuller suite of wistful gestures inspired by rambles in the forest. An obvious reference point is Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas recordings transmuting the ambience of the Black Forest into ambient gold, but Ulla & Perila’s take on this timeless notion is detectably more fractured and frayed, textured like fruiting brambles that gently snag the ankles, and decayed with a beautifully deciduous tone ripened for autumnal immersion.
Weaving synthetic micro-fibres and burnished pads into 11 gauzy visions, they coax a palette of iridescent melodies, ephemeral oneiric vox and crackling organic rhythms into scenes that describe or suggest a sort of sleepwalking sojourn into the woods, or a simulacra thereof. Their patient approach is simply enchanting, allowing their synthesised, micro-fibrous forms to naturally grow and sprawl, but with careful hands pruning the results into bonsai-like vignettes that steeply absorb listeners into sweetly naif, swirling dioramas of the real thing, bringing the outdoors inside..

Clear Vinyl

Mark Fell and Will Guthrie join forces for the second time this year with ‘Diffractions’, the 2nd in a two part series pushing deeper into percussive R&D informed/inspired by Gamelan and South Indian Carnatic musics. If you’re into anything from Autechre’s Confield-era abstractions to Milford Graves’ fluid drumming or even the insular soundworld of The Necks, this record fucking rules.
Rhythm has always been central to Fell’s work, from his icy, repetitive minimalist excursions with SND to his legendary run of unashamedly funked abstract house experiments as Sensate Focus. Here, he continues to excavate that rich seam with an ongoing collaboration with Aussie percussionist Will Guthrie; “Diffractions” pushing both artists’ interests into sharper detail, toying with polyrhythms and unusual tuning to uncover a suite of transformative fidget spins and sonic storm clouds.
“Diffractions” features another two lengthy pieces of future-facing percussive abstractions that blur the line between synthetic and organic. Taking the influence of gamelan and fusing it with the heaving computer music that Fell has obsessively picked-at over the last four decades, the duo here zoom into a sound that’s almost effortlessly engaging; each piece is almost twenty minutes in length but they shift and mutate into polyrhythmic outer-realms and eerie universes of microtonality that are hard to fathom in one sitting.
There are trace echoes of free jazz hanging from the rafters, the post-everything chatter of Humcrush and Food drummer Thomas Strønen’s mind-expanding solo material or even Autechre at their most confounding. The genius here is that just when you convince yourself that this music could only possibly have been generated by a computer, Guthrie’s unmistakably human flex edges into focus - playing with your perception - your expectations - in the most bold, innovative way imaginable.

in we go... the title track is lifted from the great 'Visions from Limbus' casette (2015), while Kraut pleaser, 'Welson', and the ultra doomy Etranglé Par Tes Limbes are more recent creations to flow from Ernesto González's psychadelic fingers....

“Twee” is Tsepo’s debut mini-album. The beautiful 6-tracker strikes a balance between breaks, percussive house, and glitchy ambient. Tsepo has been around as a DJ for over 8 years. He played Trouw, Heidegluhen, Lowlands, Shelter, DGTL, Wildeburg, and more. On “Twee”, he combines emotive melodies with expertly produced beats. The diversity of the music is perhaps best expressed in how easily the glitchy ambient works "Dough" and "Max" go together with the resonating techno track "La Vaca Vega" and the uplifting title track "Twee". "Extebarri" (where a hard snare is the basis of a driving melody) and the downtempo "Tribeca" round off the release effortlessly. Tsepo knows what he's doing and his years of experience in the DJ booth echo on this wonderful, well-crafted debut.

Violostries (1963/64), 16'39

Premiered and recorded in April 1965 at the Royan Festival - France, by Devy Erlih (violin) & Bernard Parmegiani (sound projection).

Violostries represents the intersection of several musical research directions, presented as two simultaneous dialogues - composer/performer and instrument/orchestra.

After a short introduction tutti very spatialized:
1. Pulsion/Miroirs: multiplied by itself, the violin is projected into the four corners of the sound space.
2. Jeu de cellules: concertante piece for violin and audio medium, the latter being made up of very tightly woven microsounds.
3. Végétal: slow and invisible development following a continuous time, resulting from an internal and permanent processing of the matter.

Capture éphémère (1967, 1988 version), 11'48

This work was composed in four tracks in 1967 for quadraphonic diffusion.
Remixed in stereo in 1988.
Premiered at the Studio 105 of the Maison de la Radio, Paris, May 1967.
Sounds - noises that circulate as time unfolds - continue to exist despite our recording them.
Breaths, fluttering wings: ephemeral microsonic sounds streaking space, sound scratches, landslides, bounces, vertigo of solid objects falling into an abyssal void, multiple snapshots forever frozen in their fall. As many symbols leave inside us the permanent trace of their ephemeral brushing against our ear.
Some day, a desert, a sound, then never again....
Somewhere, in my head and body something still resonates... resonance, what could be more ephemeral.

La Roue Ferris (1971), 10'45

Premiered at the Festival des chantiers navals, Menton, on August 26, 1971.
Sound projection: Bernard Parmegiani.
La Roue Ferris (Ferris wheel) spins, merging with its own resonance, stubbornly perpetuating its variations. It only sketches a regularly evolving movement around a constant axis. Each of its towers generates thick sonic layers that penetrate each other, producing a very fluid interweaving. The crackling of the origin eventually metamorphoses into sonic threads whose lightness recalls high-altitude clouds, cirrus clouds, haunted by the cries of swifts twirling in the warm air. The wondrous arises and dies off, leaving us with an illusion of duration.